Month: January 2018

If you like your underground rock jagged and rugged and raw, you’d best tune in for Ampline’s Passion Relapse. Out last week on Sofaburn Records – sometimes you plan to review a record “on time” and sometimes you get the flu, y’know? –the new LP from this guitar-driven Ohio trio is vintage Ampline: dirgy and…

“It’s always the easiest and least interesting route to have a preconceived notion of what band you want to sound like and then go do that.” Eli Kasan’s riffing again. And I’m listening close for clues. “We were terrible early on ‘cause we wanted to sound like too many things, and weren’t sure which suited…

Consider this the fresh-faced first entry of the new year in Pittsburgh Single of the Year territory. The oft-engaging Pachyderm channels The Sea and Cake and the emotional heft of a romantic relationship gone awry on “I’m Not Happy, I’m Just High,” a new two-song EP now available on Bandcamp. It does this, and this is…

I still remember the CD. My Mudhoney collection was fairly impressive in ’93, having dug deep into the band’s Sub Pop soil, but the disc I found at Vintage Vinyl, Jack’s or wherever I was buying records at the time was of special interest: it was a live bootleg. Hearing a band live – or…

Lo-fi fuzz-pop – think The Cure coalescing around the guitars of Les Thugs – is the name of the game on In A Stranger’s Car, the 2017 outing from Pittsburgh’s Barlow that gets the re-release treatment on cassette and streaming formats from Crafted Sounds Monday. The new edition features outtakes and promises of things to come….

No matter how much he loathes it, Texan and musical-firebrand Mark Deutrom forever might be inextricably linked with Melvins, the legendary Gods-of-Thunder quartet whose debut he released on Alchemy 30-odd years ago and, more importantly, for whom he played a mean bass during a good chunk of the 1990s. But the Deutrom story did not…

There’s something wondrous about the noise that emanates from a garage. Now, I’m not talking about the groan and rumble of a Harley’s engine or the clang of metal tools on the underbelly of a car. I’m talking about music here, and many who have applied their own fingers to the neck of a guitar…

Records bearing the mark of Mike Patton typically have an edgy, experimental edge to them, and Fantômas — the violently good, cut-and-paste avant-punk project he fronts alongside Melvins’ Buzz Osborne, Slayer’s Dave Lombardo, and Mr. Bungle’s Trevor Dunn — has been no exception to the rule. The group’s debut, released back in 1999, was a…